The ChEMBL-og

Privacy is pretty important - for example, in the picture above I have protected to privacy of two colleagues, as I think I should ;) In fact I've even made sure that the black box securing their identities is not a layer on the image that can be trivially removed..... Chemistry is a little different to some other areas of life-science research, and there is a little more caution applied typically in the use of 'public' database systems by people working on chemical structures - primarily because of patenting and novelty. There are probably similar privacy/security concerns over sequence data too - and in ChEMBL we've covered that too. I'm not going to drift on to what constitutes a 'publication', and all that sort of stuff since 1) I'm not qualified, 2) I don't have the time (and 1) anyway), and 3) it attracts trolls (and 1) and 2) anyway). I have been asked for a talk through on the usage and query privacy of ChEMBL as part of the great Open...

We worry about data security and privacy, a lot. I fret and sweat over this, and it is one of the things (alongside being late with EU reports) that genuinely keeps me awake at night, and that you can never know too much about (again a bit like the EU). We have started to collect examples of security and data privacy issues and vulnerabilities in online chemistry-related resources. Firstly, to build a set of real world examples, and to establish best practice for our own developers. It also allows us to potentially create an environment in which security and privacy matters can be privately discussed without the world being unnecessarily alerted to them; allowing fixes to be made, and generally keep the online chemistry world a better safer place. As would be expected for this sort of thing, the list will not be open, and not indexed in google (if it is right now, we’ve failed at step one!), so if you’re interested in joining the list, and your job involves the buil...